Paradoxism and (Outer)-Art: a New Cultural (Dis)Order?1 Interview: Mugur Grosu, Mircea Úuglea, Florentin Smarandache MG: Because I have, finally, before my eyes two significant works- your volume, Destiny (published last year although it was written 20 years ago!) and a more special work, Outer-Art, that we have to talk about without fail later on-, we can start interviewing you. At the beginning I am asking you to make a short introducing of your “inventions” until now: paradoxism, outer-art, etc. Could you place these proposed directions within a certain order of the vanguard currents? In 80’s, when the post-modernism was flourishing, you put the basis of a vanguard movement, Paradoxism. In the beginning of your volume of experimental art there was an interesting manifesto entitled “Ultra-modernism?”. What means this question mark? In manifesto’s end you said: “Let’s revolt against ‘classicised’ art and fight for a New Art World Order!” Considering the joking-crazy manner of your whole (non)artistic speech in that album, I am wondering if you don’t propose, sooner, a “new disorder” in the arts world! FS: All, who proposed a new style, provoked new apparent disorder. See the cubists, the futurists, the minimalists, the supremacists (Malevich), the constructivists (Kupka, Gabo, Rodchenko), the deconstructivists (in architecture), the baroqists, the orphists, the populists, View Art (Vasarely), Pop Art and the assemblists (Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebau, Roy Lichtenstein), the conceptualists, the abstractionists. Even some less known attempts, as the rayonism (Larionov, Goncharova) in painting, based only on linear rays, stirred up the interest of a Kandinski. I like the experiments, I am crazy about them; and from here one comes to a lack of balancing, and again to a balance in a want of balance. Nothing can remain motionless. Not all the experiments are forced, as some seem to be initially. You can’t be successful from the first attempt: neither in art, nor in science. Thomas Edison did 1750 (!) of unsuccessful experiments concerning the burning of filament in vacuum until his discovery [the discovery = successful experiment]... Not only when the question doesn’t work different solutions are sought, but also when the people are bored/sick of it. They want to drink also another cup of tea! What would it be if no more poem was written, because nobody could reach Eminescu? And to read all the time his verses only. Joyce is not the only classicised experimentalist (in fact, he was enough blamed, rejected at his time: he was describing some scabrous deeds which made many influent ladies, from the 1 Starting from paradoxism, Florentin Smarandache initiated a movement in arts too, named in his characteristic way, “Outer-Art” (1990), i.e. ‘art behind art, or art without art’, and he published an album with such a title (2000). In his previous manifesto and antimanifesto for OUTER-ART [see also http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/outer- art.htm] he pleads for making art as ugly as possible, as wrong as possible, and generally as impossible as possible. Therefore, all up-side down… smarandachely! It is no surprise that his second album is intituled “Outer-Art, the Worst Possible Art in the World!“ (2002). {I. Soare} high society, to turn up their nose... For instance, he detailed on two pages what a main character was doing at the privy: how the room was filling with pestilential smells, etc. Here is a joycean quotation, from memory: ”Into a ditch, her back a little bent in front, a woman is pissing like a cow.”). Those with the absurd theater (Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov), the same. Arrabal (with the theater of cruelty: real gooses are cut on the stage!). I won’t list all of them now... I have admired the movements of creation and I have read their rules: not to follow, but to infringe them. As well as Chaim Soutine, peintre maudit, between the two world wars, at Ecole de Paris, who was destroying periodically his paintings, I’m keeping my non-paintings. I am concerned with the involuntary painting, because deliberate art (with or without tendency), is artificial, insincere, unspontaneous. Any art is an artifice (David Graham). You have to surprise yourself if you want to be a poet (Robert Frost). I have also retort experiments to Yves Klein, or anti-compositions to De Kooning or Pollock (abstract-expressionists), whose paintings are however perceptible in repetitive units. You see, the avoidance of any form of art in order to give birth to outer-art: to paint as ...impossible as you can! Dear sir, once about 80’s, at the rubric of the beginner, in “Luceāfarul”, sustained by Geo Dumitrescu, where I was striving to publish, at the end of a year appeared a selection with the worst poems received by Geo from beginners - certainly, without mentioning the authors. I give you my word, I was reading these writings in a brewery, with other friends- writers, and we laughed till the tears came, and all of us wished to have a full of such anthology, which we had gladly bought- in comparison with the stiff verses published in every magazines, in which different poets sought to amaze in every way possible. What was happening to those novices: they didn’t obey to any rule, they weren’t ashamed to uncover their troubles, were not contaminated with influences and models, they had an amazing frankness! In the end, I considered their poems the best creations of the magazine. A real paradox! And my foresight was confirmed somehow in what is called today Junk Sculpture (sculptures of rubbish, sooner an assembling of waste). Well, this way of how to not write became as an emblem of paradoxism, later on extended to the way of how to not paint, how to not design, how to not sculpture, until the way how to not act, or how to not sing on stage - more clear: all upside-down. Look, in this way I have written “NonNovel”, “NonTheater”, “NonPoems”, ”Defective Writings”. Do you ask me how it is distinguished of dadaism? It’s very easy: dadaism had not a meaning (you take words out of a hat and form sentences), while paradoxism means to interpret in a reverse sense and to take the things contradictorily, in consequence, a meaning against the grain. A surprise for you will be the volume “Dedications” (2000), apropos of the book-object you have mentioned, Mugur. And, if I send you “NonPoems”, one cannot say if it is a volume of literature, or one of art - maybe you will make me clear. Have you seen how the linguists study the etymology of some Romanian words? After old Latin books of “correcting” the Latin spoken on Dacia’s territory and used for writing: the word is not this one, but that one...- but just that incorrectly grammatical Latin of that times, became the correct Romanian of present time! Yes, the paradoxism was developed during the post-modernist period of 1980’s, however I hadn’t relations with any post-modernist writer, even I avoided to join them, although I read the books of many of them. As regards paradoxism, I liked to not take into account the “precious indications” of any critic, but to write somehow upside-down, in counter-time. As vanguard it is placed in the line of dadaism, lettrism (I have been in correspondence with a French lettrist, François Lemaître), absurd-theater (Ionesco- teaching in Morocco, as a cooperate teacher, I received a few epistles from the playwright, he appreciating my volume “Le sens de non-sens”, which took to pieces the French clichés from a figurative sense to a proper one!; Beckett, Adamov). I specified formerly what I did in the artistic creation: I like art because I am not gifted for painting and drawing; I want to create as ugly as possible, as much against the common taste, in an unpolished, tasteless way; I used also the “found art”- taken from the nature in an unaltered state, as well as Robert Doisneau, the French photographer following in Dubuffet’s footsteps, who had said the spectacular one there was in the commonplace one! The prose writer Delia Oprea has visited an exhibition, “Les champs de la sculpture” close by Champs-Elysees, in Paris, where a sculptor, Niki de Saint Phalle, exhibited some puppets of six meters, vivid coloured (red, blue, yellow, white) which she named invariably “Nana” (she- fellow, rather ruffianly said). Niki declared: “At the beginning the public found them insulting for women, but it was not that what I wanted. That was, for me, a way to swell my femininity and my freedom, which had been repressed so many years.” I have liked a series of Stefan Balan’s wordings in counter-time, against the grain. Such a short metaphor, an antithetic one, in a few lines, says more than a full page of explanations. I was talking once with Jack Crowl, professor at UNM, at a “creative writing” program teaching how to write, within the Letters and Art Department, who had invited me, in the first months after I had come, to speak on European vanguards of Romanian origin: dadaism, lettrism, absurd theater, paradoxism. I told him: Jack, if I follow your course, I do it in order to write exactly upside-down what you learn us! The writing you must have in the blood. What attracts me at the American Universities is that you may propose a specific course outside any program and completely created by yourself, on a subject you like, with a bibliography you consider to be proper - I mean: a fully academic independence.